Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  For both meat and fish, smoking was a northern solution to a lack of salt. Salt is needed for smoking but in smaller quantities, because the smoking aids in conservation. The origin of smoking is unknown. The Romans smoked cheeses and ate Westphalian ham, which was smoked. It is not known when the first fish was smoked. In the 1960s, a Polish archaeologist found a fish smoking station in the area of Znin, which he dated from between the eighth and tenth centuries. The Celts and Germans did not lack salt, yet they smoked their hams because cold winters forced food to be enclosed in fire-warmed rooms.

  Smoked foods almost always carry with them legends about their having been created by accident—usually the peasant hung the food too close to the fire, and then, imagine his surprise the next morning when . . .

  Red herring, a famous export from the East Anglia region of England along the North Sea, is soaked in a brine of salt and saltpeter and then smoked over oak and turf. The discovery of red herring was described by a native East Anglian, Thomas Nash, in 1567. He claimed that it came about when a Yarmouth fisherman with an unusually large catch hung the surplus herring on a rafter, and by chance the room had a particularly smoky fire. Imagine his surprise the next day when the white-fleshed fish had turned “red as a lobster.”

  Finnan haddie, a haddock soaked in brine and then smoked over peat and sawdust, was originally called Findon haddocks because it was made in the Scottish North Sea town of Findon, near Aberdeen. It was not commercialized until the mid–eighteenth century, though it may have been a household product for a long time before that. Despite the relatively recent date, it is commonly said that finnan haddie too was originally made accidentally by fishermen hanging their salt fish too close to the smoky peat fire in their cabin.

  By the sixteenth century, if not earlier, on the Swedish coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, the body of water between Sweden and Finland, a light cure was devised for Baltic herring, and these pickled fish became known as surströmming. The Baltic Sea, a less salty body of water than the North Sea, has leaner and smaller herring than the Atlantic and North Sea herring eaten by the British and the Dutch. In Sweden, which has both a North Sea and a Baltic coast, the fish are known by completely different names. A Baltic herring is called a strömming, and a North Sea herring is a sill. A number of Baltic languages make this distinction. Russians speak of a Baltic salaka and an Atlantic sel’d’.

  A story persists in Sweden that surströmming was discovered by accident by Swedes trying to save on salt. Surströmming was a basic ration of the Swedish army in the seventeenth century during the fifty years of sporadic armed conflict that is known as the Thirty Years War. It is still regulated by a medieval royal ordinance and must be made from herring caught in April and May just before spawning. The head and entrails are removed, but the roe is kept in the herring, which is put into light brine in barrels holding 200 pounds of fish. The fish are left to ferment in the barrels for ten to twelve weeks at a temperature between fifty-four and sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit. The third Thursday in August, the producers are allowed to put the fish on the market.

  Originally it was taken from the barrel, but in modern times it is canned in July. By eating time in September, the can is bulging on the top and bottom and looks ready to explode. As the can is opened, the family stands around it to get the first fumes. Nowadays some of the younger members flee the room. The can opener digs in, and a white milky brine fizzes out, bubbling like fermented cider and smelling like a blend of Parmesan cheese and the bilge water from an ancient fishing vessel.

  These potent little fish have always been shrouded in controversy because, like Roman garum, they flirtatiously hover between fermented and rotten. Like garum, through, surströmming is in truth fermented and not rotten, because the brine the fish is dipped in is sufficient to prevent putrification until the fermentation process takes over. If done properly, surströmming has a strong flavor, one revered by aficionados of cured fish and loathed by the less initiated.

  To eat surströmming, the bloated, bluish-white, little headless fish is slit in the belly and the roe removed. None but the brave eat the roe. The splayed fish is mashed hard on the spine with a fork and turned over. The bones can then be easily lifted off. The wine-colored fermented flesh inside is then placed on a buttered krisp, a Swedish cracker, with mashed potatoes. Swedes use a small long yellow fingerling potato with a floury texture—a breed designed to survive the northern winter. In the north of Sweden, onions are added, but in the south this is regarded as an unnecessary distraction. Once properly blended with all these tastes and textures, the fish is surprisingly pleasant. The only remaining problem is how to get the smell out of the house, a lingering odor that suggests the question: How could such a thing possibly have been eaten? In recent years a Swedish company tried to export surströmming to the United States, but the U.S. government refused it entry on the grounds that it was rotten.

  THE MORE USUAL way of preserving fish required a great deal of salt. Herring salting was described by Simon Smith, an agent for the British government, in 1641. As soon as the herring were taken from the nets, they were passed to “grippers,” who gutted them and mixed them with dry salt crystals and packed them in a barrel. The barrels were then left for a day to draw out the herring juice and dissolve most of the salt. Then more salt was added and the barrel closed. According to Smith, the brine had to be dense enough for the herring to float. A barrel containing 500 to 600 herring would require fifty-five pints of salt.

  The salt shortage of the northern fisheries was solved by a commercial group that organized both herring and salt trades. Between 1250 and 1350, a grouping of small associations in northern German cities formed. Known as the Hanseatic League, from the Middle High German word Hanse, meaning “fellowship,” these associations pooled their resources to form more powerful groups to act in their commercial interests. They stopped piracy in the Baltic, initiated quality control on traded items, established commercial laws, provided reliable nautical charts, and built lighthouses and other aids to navigation.

  Before the Hanseatics gained control of the northern herring trade, peat salt was often laced with ashes, and inferior, even rotten herring was commonly sold. Le mèsnagier de Paris gave this advice: “Good brine cured herring can be recognized because it is lean but with a thick back, round and green, whereas the bad ones are fat and yellow or the backs are flat and dry.”

  The fine, round-backed ones would be nicely displayed on the top of the barrel, and then only a few layers down lay the flat, dry backs. The Hanseatics guaranteed that an entire barrel was of quality. Those caught placing bad herring in the bottom of a barrel were heavily fined and forced to return the payment they received. The inferior fish were burned and not thrown back into the sea for fear other fish would eat them and become tainted.

  By the fourteenth century, the Hanseatics controlled the mouths of all the northerly flowing rivers of central Europe from the Rhine to the Vistula. They had organizations in Iceland, in London, and as far south as the Ukraine and even in Venice. This gave them the ability to buy salt from numerous sources to supply the northern countries. In the early fourteenth century, the Hanseatics, realizing the low prices and light tax on Portuguese salt more than made up for the cost of transporting it a longer distance, imported Setúbal white salt to trade in the Danish and Dutch fisheries. In the year 1452 alone, 200 Hanseatic ships stopped in Le Croisic to load Guérande salt for the Baltic.

  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Fasterbö and Skanör in southern Sweden became major herring producers. They imported salt from the Hanseatic German port of Lübeck and exported their cured herring back to Lübeck to be marketed throughout Europe. All of this trade was carried on Hanseatic ships. At the height of their power in the fifteenth century, the Hanseatics were believed to have had at their command 40,000 vessels and 300,000 men.

  For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices.
They were known as Easterlings because they came from the east, and this is the origin of the word sterling, which meant “of assured value.” The Hanseatics are still honored by a street name—Esterlines Street—in the medieval port district of the Basque city of San Sebastián.

  But in time they were seen as ruthless aggressors who wanted to monopolize all economic activity, and the merchant class rebelled against them. To control herring and salt was to control northern economies. In 1360, the Danes went to war with the Hanseatics over control of herring and lost. By 1403, when the Hanseatic League gained complete control of Bergen, Norway, it had achieved a monopoly on northern European production of herring and salt but not without constant warfare with rebellious Baltic states. In 1406, the Hanseatics caught ninety-six British fishermen off Bergen, tied their hands and feet, and threw them overboard.

  Baltic herring started to vanish—perhaps too much adultery was being committed in Baltic villages—and the North Sea catches became larger than ever. Suddenly the strömming had vanished and the sill abounded. This strengthened the English and the Dutch and weakened the Hanseatic League. Slowly the British and Dutch gained enough economic and military might to overwhelm the cartel. This was especially true after colonization gave them North American fisheries.

  But once the Hanseatic League began to fade, the Dutch and British were still in competition. Their herring fisheries, which became the European leaders, faced each other across the North Sea in Brielle on the Dutch side and Yarmouth on the English side.

  The seasonal arrival of the herring shoals became essential to the economies of both England and Holland. In medieval England, every spring, lookouts were posted along the important seaward points of eastern Britain to spot the arrival of the herring. The lookouts would point with a stick to indicate the direction the shoal was swimming from the first point off Crane Head in the Shetlands in early June until they reached Yarmouth in September. In Yarmouth, as early as the fourteenth century, the annual fair marking the end of the herring season, held from September 29 until November 10, attracted herring merchants from the rest of Europe.

  Like the Venetian salt fleet, the huge Dutch herring fleet was trained as an armed naval force that fought numerous wars in Europe and the Caribbean against the British professional navy. Finally, in 1652, the British navy destroyed the Dutch herring fleet. In time, the Dutch made peace with the British. England got a Dutch king. But this still left the French, who had their own herring fleets and every intention of controlling salt and being a world power.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Well-Salted Hexagon

  IN A 1961 speech, Charles de Gaulle, explaining the ungovernable character of the French nation, said, “Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese.” The reason for the variety is that, given its limited area, the amalgamation that became France had a remarkable diversity of climates, topography, and cultures. The nation was slowly constructed from feudal kingdoms. It included Burgundians and Provençals, Germanic-speaking Alsatians, Celtic-speaking Bretons, Basques, and Catalans. The Hexagon, as the French would come to call it, bordered the Lowlands, the Rhine, the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees, the Atlantic, and the English Channel, which the French have never called English but simply La Manche, the sleeve, a word that refers to its long and narrow shape. The Hexagon offered a wealth of salt: rock salt, brine springs, and both Mediterranean and Atlantic sea salt.

  The royal tables of the diverse medieval and Renaissance French kingdoms were set with huge, ornate nefs, ships, in this case jeweled vessels holding salt. A nef was both a saltcellar and a symbol of the “ship of state.” Salt symbolized both health and preservation. Its message was that the ruler’s health was the stability of the nation.

  In 1378, Charles V of France hosted a famous dinner that posed the awkward question of where to place the nef. Should it be in front of him or by his guest Charles IV, the Prague-born Holy Roman Emperor? And what about the emperor’s son who was also joining them, King Wenceslaus of Germany, who would become emperor after his father’s death later that same year? It was decided that the table had to be set with three large nefs, one for each of the three monarchs.

  Richard II, the fourteenth-century British monarch whose unpopularity was attributed to both his gaudy extravagance and his lackluster pursuit of the Hundred Years War with France, had a nef on his table with figures of eight tiny men on the ship deck hoisting the flags of France. The unusual nef had no shortage of admirers, since Richard employed 2,000 chefs and was said to have entertained 10,000 visitors daily, most of whom stayed for dinner.

  In the fifteenth century, Jean, duc de Berry, featured on his banquet table a gold ship that held not only salt but pepper, as well as, according to some accounts, powdered unicorn horn. Since it is doubtful that anyone has ever seen a unicorn, the powder may have been from the tusk of a narwhal, a single-horned relative of the whale. Unicorn horn was believed to be a poison antidote, which many monarchs wanted to have close-by at mealtime. Some nefs contained “serpent’s tongue,” which was actually shark’s tooth, for the same purpose. The compartments in nefs were frequently locked.

  Elaborate saltcellars in all forms, not only ships, were popular. In addition to his nef, in 1415 the duc de Berry, a notable patron of the arts, received from the artist Paul de Limbourg an agate saltcellar with gold lid and a sapphire knob with four pearls.

  In the sixteenth century, when things Italian were especially fashionable, Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine high-Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith, made a saltcellar for King François I of France, perennial war maker and insatiable art enthusiast. The dish of salt was held between the figure of Neptune, god of the sea, and the earth goddess—salt between its two sources, sea and earth. By Neptune’s knee was a temple with a tiny drawer for pepper.

  In addition to an elaborate saltcellar, referred to as the Great Salt, lesser saltcellars would be removed from the table and others brought out with changing courses. The Great Salt stayed by the master or host or most honored guest throughout the meal.

  Benvenuto Cellini’s saltcellar for François I. Kuntshistorisches

  Museum, Vienna

  It was considered rude, sometimes even unlucky, to touch salt with the fingers. Salt was taken from the cellar on the tip of a knife and a small pile put on the diner’s plate. Some medieval and Renaissance plates had a small depression for salt.

  Placing salt on the table was a rich man’s luxury, but all classes ate salted foods. In 1268, the Livre des métiers, the Book of Trades, which listed the rules of the cooking profession, said that cooked meat could be kept for only three days unless it had been salted. Le mèsnagier de Paris gave recipes for not only salted whale, but also beef, mutton, venison, coot (an aquatic bird), goose, hare, and a great number of pork products. Although salting was often done in the home, it was usually not women’s work. The medieval French, like the Chinese, believed that the presence of women could be destructive to fermentation. In France, a menstruating woman is said to be en salaison, curing in salt. It was dangerous to have a woman in a room full of fermenting food when she herself was in fermentation. “It will spoil the lard,” people would say.

  Originally, salting was a way to keep food through the winter, but by the Middle Ages such foods were eaten year-round.

  In June and July pieces of salted beef and mutton should be well cooked in water with green onions after having rested in salt from morning to evening or for a day or more.—Le Mèsnagier de Paris, 1393

  A food that typifies the French love of salted foods is the choucroute of Alsace and Lorraine. Alsace, known as Elsass in German, was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and France did not add it to its Hexagon until 1697. The Alsatian language is a dialect of German. Choucroute appears to have evolved from German sauerkraut. But the French, having a resistance to acknowledging German origins in their culture, argue that the Chinese salted cabbage, and the Tartars made it, and, always the favorite French source for fo
reign food, Catherine de Médicis might have introduced it. Catherine was a sixteenth-century Florentine who married the future Henri II of France and moved to his country with many Italian food ideas.

  In a popular French legend, superstar Sarah Bernhardt went to a Chinese restaurant in Paris and ordered choucroute. The waiter fetched the maître d’, who with a suggestion of indignation informed the actress, “This is a Chinese restaurant, Madame.”

  “Mais oui, Monsieur,” the actress supposedly replied. “Choucroute is a Chinese invention.”

  The Chinese may not have invented it. Scientists have found evidence of early hunters curing a leaf that resembled cabbage. But the Chinese have been pickling vegetables for millennia, and cabbage was one of the first vegetables used.

  The Romans made sauerkraut and were great cabbage enthusiasts. Cato suggested that women would live long, healthy lives if they washed their genitals in the urine of a cabbage eater. He was listened to on health matters, since in an age of short lives and high infant mortality he lived to be over eighty and claimed to have fathered twenty-eight sons, all of which he credited to eating cabbage with salt and vinegar.

  On the other side, Platina, from fifteenth-century Cremona, had warned against it:

  It is agreed that cabbage is of a warm and dry nature and for this reason increases black bile, generates bad dreams, is not very nourishing, harms the stomach a little and the head and eyes very much, on account of its gas, and dims the vision.

  The Alsatian word for choucroute, surkrut, resembles the German, sauerkraut. Both words have the same meaning: sour or pickled grass. The German princess Palatine, sister-in-law to Louis XIV, claimed to have introduced the dish to the court at Versailles. She wrote back to her sister in Germany, “I have also made Westphalian-type raw hams fashionable here. Everyone eats them now, and they also eat many of our German foods—sauerkraut, and sugared cabbage, as well as cabbage with fat bacon, but it is hard to get it of good quality.” She sent to Germany for cabbage seeds but still complained that the vegetable did not grow well in sandy French soil.